Hubert Catchpole

1906-2006

Researcher, professor at U. of I. Medical Center

Quest for knowledge began when he received an encyclopedia as a boy growing up in rural England

April 14, 2006|By Josh Noel, Tribune staff reporter

Growing up in rural England in a family where the parents struggled to feed their children, Hubert Catchpole had few options. But his farming family saw in him a spark that led them to save for years to buy him an encyclopedia when he was 8 or 9.

His parents were right about that spark.

That book helped set him on a path of research and knowledge and a 60-plus year career in academia, most of it spent at the University of Illinois Medical Center in Chicago.

Known as "Catch" to many friends, Dr. Catchpole, 99, died Saturday, March 25, at his Near North Side townhouse of complications from pneumonia, weeks before his 100th birthday.

His closest living relative, brother-in-law Byrd Miller, has been trying to find that encyclopedia in Dr. Catchpole's home, but to no avail.

"He could still quote passages out of it because he read it and read it and read it," Miller said.

"He was incredibly knowledgeable about almost everything. Whatever was your most prized area of knowledge, he would know more about it. He would know more about almost anything you could think of than anyone."

Yet Dr. Catchpole never flaunted that knowledge, Miller said.

"He would try to add to someone, not to decrease from them or make them feel inferior," he said. "Sometimes he would just be quiet so as not to make the other person feel badly."

Dr. Catchpole was born in London, but raised by foster parents in a small farming town outside Norwich, England. He never met his biological parents.

In a time and place when most children did not attend school past their middle teens, Dr. Catchpole attended Cambridge University on scholarship and received a degree in biochemistry. He moved to the United States in 1930 for graduate and post-doctoral work in the University of California system, receiving a PhD in comparative physiology in 1933.

He taught physiology at Yale University from 1936 to 1943, but longed to join the war effort for what he considered his country. A congressman friend in Connecticut made him a U.S. citizen in 1943 with a rider attached to a bill in the House of Representatives, said longtime friend James Ward.

As an officer in the U.S. Navy, Dr. Catchpole did research on decompression sickness of divers and aviators.

In 1946 Dr. Catchpole resumed his medical career at the University of Illinois as a research professor of pathology in the medical school and a professor of histology.

Research interests included tumor growth, the physiology and pathology of connective tissues, amyloid disease, and more recently, the theoretical basis for the distribution of salts in cells and tissues, Ward said. He published more than 130 academic articles, the last in 2005.

Dr. Catchpole also loved geography, history and classical music and "was as easily conversant with the novels of Henry James or Hermann Hesse as he was with the Beethoven quartets or the works of Bela Bartok," Ward said.

In a quiet civil ceremony in 1972, Dr. Catchpole married Robin Miller, a graduate student at the medical school 30 years his junior. The age difference quickly disappeared to the bride's family.

"His goal was the same as hers: knowledge," Byrd Miller said. "When she introduced professor Hubert Catchpole, we immediately knew why she loved him. They were a perfect match."

Dr. Catchpole's wife died of cancer in 1996.

A memorial service will be held at 2 p.m. April 22 in St. Mark's Episcopal Church, 337 Ridge Rd., Barrington Hills.